retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time, #52

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” - Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #48

"Bosch and Brueghel were ahead of their time. They were fighting against enormous odds to make statements that might be seen as sinful. Looking at their pictures, I see these brown and red tones that seem to evoke history and madness at the same time, and I want to commend them for taking this plunge into madness...." -- Ed Ruscha, on his Vienna show 'The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas', New Yorker interview, 2013 

(Title for show stolen from Mark Twain's autobiography)

(Ruscha quote via Our God Is Speed)

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - # 43

"... and everybody knows the ‘web’ as it used, quaintly, to be called, exists to contain obscenities or excesses of feeling we don’t know what else to do with.  An accumulation of problems that cannot be solved, of things from the past and undead things with which we live, in these times, perhaps more intimately than any age has ever lived with what is no longer contemporary, what is no longer merely alive, and with what has finally become, more than ever, truly timeless"--Ariana Reines

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #42

“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper,” – W.H. Auden Secondary Worlds (1967)

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #41

"Modernity" in the perspective of the metaphor of nourishment and digestion.-

"Sensibility immensely more irritable (-dressed up moralistically: the increase in pity-); the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever: cosmopolitanism in foods, literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes. The tempo of this influx prestissimo; the impressions erase each other; one instinctively resists taking in anything, taking anything deeply, to "digest" anything; a weakening of the power to digest results from this. A kind of adaptation to this flood of impressions takes place: men unlearn spontaneous action, they merely react to stimuli from outside. They spend their strength partly in assimilating things, partly in defense, partly in opposition. Profound weakening of spontaneity: the historian, critic, analyst, the interpreter, the observer, the collector, the reader-all of them reactive talents -all science!

"Artificial change of one's nature into a "mirror"; interested but, as it were, merely epidermically interested; a coolness on principle, a balance, a fixed low temperature closely underneath the thin surface on which warmth, movement, "tempest," and the play of waves are encountered.

"Opposition of external mobility and a certain deep heaviness and weariness." --Friedrich Nietzche, The Will To Power, (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #39

"The fact is, when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning for another age.

"He bursts out of the prison of his century and roams about at liberty in another period, with which, as a crowning illusion, he imagines he would have been more in accord.

"In some cases there is a return to past ages, to vanished civilisations, to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit of dream and fantasy, a more or less vivid vision of a future whose image reproduces, unconsciously and as a result of atavism, that of past epochs"-- J.K. Huysmans,  Against Nature.  

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #38

“I consider it to be post-creation. We're all now just pulling and pulling and pulling.  Someone like Prince was thinking of people in the past, but it didn't feel as funneled and as specific.  We're a bit derivative, unfortunately, and it's not to our detriment always-- but we are direct descendants and there are all these lineages. It's an interesting time for music because people aren't trying to create anything brand new...  Originality is not a thing anymore" -- Amanda Brown on the state of the art in music", May 2011 (interview with me for The Wire cover story on Not Not Fun)

versus

“I think the Simon Reynolds perspective is the least modern attitude one could have toward art. And it’s a little unfortunate that it’s infected so many people’s way of thinking. There’s been almost no era when art hasn’t been hugely about the past – whether reacting to it, recreating it, destroying it. Once in a while, a new piece of actual music technology is invented and for the small window of time after that there is a fresh, truly “new” style. But that’s not the norm, that’s the fluke.... Rockabilly was retromania, Morrissey was retromania” --Amanda Brown, November 2011

^^^^^^
  "It's like, 'I've just stumbled across a thing that nobody else has referenced yet'....   Everyone's more inspired by a style, and the desire to be creative. It doesn't mean there isn't emotion in the process.... But it does feel a little divorced. That's why a lot of contemporary styles can have a sheen of irony, because there's not a ton of people really fervently standing behind what they do.  There's no Fugazis anymore"-- Britt Brown, May 2011, (interview with me for The Wire cover story on Not Not Fun)

versus 

 “I think reinterpreting old tropes (whether primitively, abstractly, offensively, surreally) has always been a strategy of artists for moving forward.... Everything's always been referential, we just have more hyperlinks now"--- Britt Brown, date unknown.